Fotopic Directors Issue Public Statement
January 5, 2009 3:28 pm NewsSnappy Designs Ltd released an official statement regarding the weekend-long outage.
STATEMENT FROM SNAPPY DESIGNS LTD, 5TH JANUARY 2009
Dear Fotopic User,
On Friday 2nd January 2008 photo sharing site Fotopic.net suffered a
core equipment failure while upgrading the server and network
capacity. As a result of this the Fotopic.net website was unavailable
from approximately 9am on Friday 2nd January.
Despite our best efforts to resolve the situation the gallery service
remained unavailable until approximately 10:30am on Monday 5th January
2008.
As a result of this outage we are examining our hosting capability and
contingency plans, but wish to assure customers that Fotopic.net has
not ceased trading and will be enhancing its services during 2009. No
data or images have been lost during this time and all systems are
back to normal.
Additionally we will be extending Plus and Premium subscriptions by an
extra 2 weeks as a goodwill gesture.
We apologise for the situation which was ultimately out of our
control, and would like to thank customers for bearing with us.
Best regards,
The Directors
Snappy Designs Ltd trading as Fotopic.net
Joel Rowbottom created Fotopic.net as a personal photo blogging site in 1999. It grew in popularity amongst his friends and eventually became a public gallery site in 2001, jointly owned by Joel and his wife.
The couple sold the site in May 2008 to Snappy Designs Ltd.
“Snappy Designs Ltd is a company which is owned and operated by a consortium spearheaded by ANY-Web Group. No directors or shareholders are shared between the two companies (given that the directors and shareholders were myself and Nicky I can authoritatively say that!). The company had been on the market since February and we’d had some expressions of interest; Snappy were the first ones to get to the finishing line,” said Rowbottom
Fotopic accepts a million photos a month for publication, has 10 million photos live in the system. 2,500 new users every week join Fotopic, making it one of the largest UK-based gallery sites.